"Climategate" Continues To Sputter Out

Over at Newsweek, Sharon Begley notes that a couple of newspapers have now retracted some of their "Climategate" allegations. The Sunday Times of London, in particular, just published a long mea culpa for a piece Jonathan Leake wrote claiming that the IPCC's work on rainforests in its 2007 assessment was "bogus." The fact that the Times had to retract shouldn't come as a surprise—as I pointed out back in February, Leake's story was incredibly sloppy and he had apparently misquoted the climate experts he interviewed.

In any case, it's nice to get an official retraction, but the reporting still did some damage to the IPCC's reputation. For the record, it still looks like the IPCC has only been caught in one real error to date—the goof about Himalayan glaciers—along with one minor misstatement about flooding in the Netherlands. Oh, and all the investigations into Phil Jones and Michael Mann and the rest of the "Climategate" researchers have turned up... nothing. Still, despairing climate skeptics can always claim it's all a big whitewash. The good thing about conspiracy theories is that they're unfalsifiable.